Alteryx Automates Data Blending for Its Analytics App

Five Ways Automation Speeds Up Big Data Deployments

At its core, analytics is all about the ability to correlate data from different sources to identify patterns that help make sense of the business. The challenge has been finding a way to gain access to that data without having to wait on someone in IT to find the time to provide it.

To address that issue, Alteryx this week released version 9.5 of Alteryx Analytics, which now provides the ability to more easily blend data residing in Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. Alteryx president and COO George Mathew says that rather than manually coding SQL to blend that data, Alteryx now automates the process.

Of course, business users still have the option of pulling the data into memory where Alteryx automatically normalizes. But Mathew notes that many organizations are now routinely dealing with massive volumes of data, which makes providing access to that data in memory or on disk a necessity.

In general, Mathew notes that a whole new class of citizen integrators has emerged, looking to integrate data without having to rely on the intervention of the internal IT department. Alteryx is taking that concept to the next logical level by providing data blending capabilities directly inside the analytics application, says Mathew.

The end result, says Mathew, is greater self-empowerment for the business users and less reliance on the operational extract, transform and load (ETL) processes that are too time consuming to keep up with the increased demands for access to all types of data.